Oren
Lyons is the Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Council of
Chiefs of the Hau de no sau nee (ho dee noe sho nee), of the
Onondaga Nation of the Hau de
no sau nee (meaning People Building a Long House). Born in 1930,
he was raised in the traditional life ways of the Hau de no sau nee
on the Seneca and Onondaga reservations. In 1982 he helped establish
the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations where he
has participated in the Indigenous Peoples Conference in Geneva, an
international forum supported by the United Nations' Human Rights
Commission. He is a principal figure in the
Traditional Circle
of Indian Elders, a council of traditional grassroots leadership
of North American Indian nations.

Bill Moyers:

In this hour, a visit
with Oren Lyons, the Faithkeeper. I'm Bill Moyers.

[narration] When Dances
With Wolves won the Academy Award for the best picture of the year,
the recognition confirmed a turning point in the perception of the
American Indian. The film was free of those clichés of the Old West
created in the earliest days of Hollywood. These Native Americans
spoke in their own language. They expressed human emotions and humor
and they appeared as neither victims nor savages, but as real people
living in real time, in touch with the land. The movie has been
widely praised by Indians as an immense breakthrough in the
perception of native peoples. For Native Americans like Oren Lyons,
that breakthrough was a long time coming.

Chief Lyons is the
Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation and has
devoted his life to preserving the experiences and wisdom of his
people and interpreting them to the dominant American culture. He
serves now as Director of Native American Studies at the State
University of New York at Buffalo. But he also plays an active and
peripatetic role in representing the Iroquois and other native
peoples on issues ranging from the environment to land claims and
the restoration of sacred symbols.

One of his mandates as
Faithkeeper of his tribe is to keep alive the legend and stories of
his people's traditions.

[interview] You're an
artist and this is your drawing, isn't it?

Oren Lyons:

Yes. It's a painting.
It's a depiction of the Great Tree of Peace and the two individuals
who had the most to do with it, the Great Peacemaker (who is on the
left as we look at it), and Hayanwatah (who was his supporter). The
Tree of Peace, of course, is the great spiritual law and it sits on
the back of the turtle, which is our metaphor for this island. We
call North America the Great Turtle Island.

Interspersed and
intertwined among the leaves of the tree and around the tree,
gathered around it, are the great clans. The Deer Clan (and the deer
is recognized as a leader of animals), the hawk who sits in the
tree, the bear who is another powerful, mysterious entity, and the
wolf who is our spiritual brother in this life. He is recognized by
native people around the world as a very powerful entity. And over
on the left, on the neck of the turtle is a snipe, which is a clan,
a huge family.

Bill Moyers:

Every part of that
painting is a symbol.

Oren Lyons:

Yes. When the
Peacemaker had planted the Tree of Peace, he placed the eagle in the
top. And the eagle would belong to everyone and the eagle would sit
there in vigilance and watch and would scream when things were
coming towards the tree. He said that there will come a time when
this tree will be attacked.

We can look at that
at this time or we could have looked at it in 1776 or we could have
looked at it in 1620, when it has come under attack. Today, it's
still here. The tree is still standing and we, the chiefs of the
Long House, are dedicated to its continuance and to its future.

Bill Moyers:

When you say the tree
is still here, you mean spiritually?

Oren Lyons:

Spiritually. Yes. It
was a spiritual tree to begin with. Because again, people are so
literal. It's hard at times to have a discussion with people who
think in linear terms. Because they say, "We come to see the tree."
And we say, "It's a great tree. It reaches to the heavens. You can't
see it. You can't see it? We can see it." But it's there. And it's
very real. And again, as we were told, sometimes the most real
things you can't see.

Bill Moyers:

[narration] Oren Lyons
was
an All-American lacrosse player at Syracuse University and in
1983 helped found a team called the
Iroquois Nationals.
In 1990, they traveled to Australia for the Lacrosse World
Championship games, the first time in over 100 years that the
Iroquois carried their own flag and performed their own anthem in
international competition. He says lacrosse is as native to the
Indians as they are to the landscape.

[interview] We
watched the children playing lacrosse yesterday. Does it teach them
something? Or is it just for the heck of it?

Oren Lyons:

No. I think
lacrosse and Iroquois are synonymous with life, I think
[laughs]. Or its synonymous with continuation [of] community.
Everybody's involved. The children [are] involved, parents are
involved. Our greatest fans -- the greatest lacrosse fans -- are the
women. Women love the game. And it's more than a game, has been.

Bill Moyers:

What do you mean more
than a game? You were a star goalie back in the fifties. Wasn't it
just a game to you then?

Oren Lyons:

No. You could have
called me a ringer because I had been playing lacrosse for so long
by the time that I got to the university that I had a great deal of
experience. Because our people do it from these little fellows on
up. And my grandfather was a lacrosse player. My father was a
well-known goal keeper. It goes back. It's not only us. Some of the
great leaders --
Tecumseh
was a great lacrosse player.

Bill Moyers:

No, I didn't know
that.

Oren Lyons:

Oh yes. These people,
Osceola was noted for his lacrosse playing.

Bill Moyers:

Is lacrosse ceremony?
Is it ritual?

Oren Lyons:

Yes it is. Oh, yes.

Bill Moyers:

As I look at it what
am I seeing?.

Oren Lyons:

First of all it's a
spiritual game. It's origin -- it's called The Creator's Game.

Bill Moyers:

Lacrosse?

Oren Lyons:

Lacrosse is The
Creator's Game and he loves to have the contest and the vitality of
the contest. And so, the harder you play -- you're supposed to play
it as hard as you can -- but, don't cheat and you do things fair.
Everything is always fair. Always fair. Do things fair.

Bill Moyers:

This game was here as
long as your memory takes you back?

Oren Lyons:

As long as we can
remember. And I think an important point to make at this time was
that this was a team sport. This was a sport and it was played by
teams of people. And that's a comment on the society, where our
technology -- we have great technology. It's too bad I don't have a
snow snake here to show you.

Bill Moyers:

A what?

Oren Lyons:

A snow snake. It's a
game that we invented that [has] a long, slender wood which is
carved to [a] real fine finish. And it's shellacked and it's
varnished and it's waxed and it can be thrown a mile in the snow, in
the track. Now that's technology. That's real technology. But we put
it into a game.

We didn't develop the
F-16, we didn't develop . . . we didn't go in that direction. We are
people who sat under a tree for a long time, talking about things,
talked about society, talk about the importance of community, talk
about law, talk about rules. Indian country, this Onondaga, has got
a lot of rules here. Mohawks have a lot of rules. How do you live
there? How do you live? None of it written.

Bill Moyers:

[narration] Oren Lyons
was a successful commercial artist in New York City before returning
to his people to take up his duties as Faithkeeper. He lives on
native land near Syracuse and we met in his cabin there for this
conversation.

[interview] Why did
you come back here to live on the reservation? You gave up a
successful career as a commercial artist in New York City.

Oren Lyons:

There are several
reasons. First of all, I believe I learned all I needed to learn
about New York City. Probably stayed two or three years too long.
The other, of course, was to come back and get back into harness, so
to speak here, more directly with the people. And [in] 1967, I was
condoled as one of the faithkeepers.

Bill Moyers:

Condoled?

Oren Lyons:

Yes. That's a process
of raising leadership in the Hau de no sau nee. People ask the
question all the time, "How did you become a chief?" And it goes
back to the roots of democracy.

Bill Moyers:

Were you chosen by a
vote of the people?

Oren Lyons:

No. No. It doesn't
work that way. A long time ago, when we first began the process of
our governance and we were given this government, the Peacemaker (we
call him the Great Peacemaker) came amongst us, brought peace
amongst the Mohawk and the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga and the
Seneca. And he laid down the rules at that time. We don't know how
long ago. Maybe a thousand years ago, maybe two.

Bill Moyers:

Maybe more.

Oren Lyons:

It may be more. It
doesn't matter.

Bill Moyers:

This is the legend
that's come down.

Oren Lyons:

This is the story.

Bill Moyers:

The Peacemaker was a
visitor?

Oren Lyons:

The Peacemaker was a
spiritual being. He was a messenger, we would say, the best we could
say. He brought a message, the Great Peace. And it was a long
process of how he changed the minds of all of these men who at that
time were leaders by strength and by force. Then he stepped in there
and changed that whole process to deliberation and thought. And he
convinced these warriors at that time (who were the leaders) to join
with him. And he changed their minds.

He moved from the
Mohawk first to the Oneida. And then he moved to the Onondaga. He
couldn't deal with the leader at Onondaga, the Tadodaho. So he went
on to the Cayuga and the Seneca. And they all came back. And when
they came back they had the support of their minds. They had agreed.
These men had changed. And so he--

Bill Moyers:

Because they had
listened to the Peacemaker?

Oren Lyons:

They had listened to
the Peacemaker and his message. Now -- but he had to bring the
Onondagas in. And he did.

Bill Moyers:

You were a stubborn
people?

Oren Lyons:

Very stubborn. In
particular, the man, the leader at the time, the Tadodaho, was
fierce. He was a man with snakes in his hair. He was a man who was
twisted and deformed and fierce and a cannibal. He was so powerful
that people feared him and he just stayed in the woods, hard to
reach.

So they were given
help, their spiritual help, in the terms of a song from a bird. This
song was what they learned and what they came to him with. And as
they approached -- all these leaders, all these people singing this
song, with the Peacemaker and Hayanwatah in front -- whom some
people now call Hiawatha.

Bill Moyers:

Hiawatha

Oren Lyons:

Hayanwatah and the
Peacemaker worked together on this great work. They approached him.
As they approached him with this they convinced him. And they said
that if he agreed to join this
Great Law,
this Great Peace, that Onondaga would be the center fire, would
be the Fire Keepers. The Onondaga would be the Fire Keepers of the
Hau de no sau nee. And the Hau de no sau nee would be the name of
the confederation who the French call Iroquois and who the English
call Six Nations.

So the Hau de no sau
nee came about and he agreed. And he became the spiritual leader.
They said all of those 50 original men from those nations, their
names became offices. And when one passed on then a ceremony was
performed, a condolence of replacement.

So then this was the
peaceful replacement of authority. It was a very simple process.
What he had established in our laws was that each of those leaders
was a leader of a family. His family was a clan and clans were given
designations of a wolf, of a turtle, of a deer, of a bear, of a
snipe, of an eel, of a beaver, of a heron; all of these
designations.

Then there would be
in each of these clans five leaders. There would be a Clan Mother,
whose purpose was to choose the Chief.

Bill Moyers:

Why? Why the mother?
Why did that go to the woman?

Oren Lyons:

Because in his first
encounter as he landed on the eastern shores of what is now called
Lake Ontario, he stopped overnight at a lodge of a woman. And this
woman took him in and said that this was a place where people could
stop and could refresh themselves and could eat. It was a neutral
place. Even though there was warpath that was on, everybody that
came there recognized that this was a neutral place for peace.
They'd spend the night here--

Bill Moyers:

So they'd leave their
weapons outside?

Oren Lyons:

Outside. And they
passed that particular time together. So when he told her of his
mission and what he was about she said, `That's wonderful. I agree
with that.' Her name was Jigonsahseh, she was Seneca or of the Cat
Nation, the Erie.

And so he went on
about his business. Then he discovered this other man by the name of
Hayanwatah who was an Onondaga by birth and who was adopted by the
Mohawk in the process. So he established the process of adoption
during all of this. At any rate, the two worked together. It was
they who were in the lead of the group of men that were approaching
Tadodaho with a song. And as they approached him, he transformed and
agreed to this Great Peace and--

Bill Moyers:

You mean, the people
approaching, singing the sound of the bird

Oren Lyons:

of the bird

Bill Moyers:

and this creature
with wild hair and twisted body, as you say, he responded?

Oren Lyons:

He responded. He
agreed.

Bill Moyers:

He changed.

Oren Lyons:

He changed. And there
was a law, there was a lesson there for everyone. And that lesson
was, no matter how bad a person is, he can change to be the very
best.

Bill Moyers:

He can be born again.

Oren Lyons:

It actually, it was,
I hesitate to use that word because it has such a different
connotation today [laughs]. But really . . .

Bill Moyers:

A spiritual
conversion, that's the metaphor isn't it?

Oren Lyons:

Yes. It was a
spiritual conversion.

Bill Moyers:

And the woman, that
custom still prevails that the woman who greeted the Peacemaker
chooses the next chief?

Oren Lyons:

Oh yes. At that time,
as we moved along, in his process of when he set down, he said,
`This society will follow' -- because the woman -- the woman was the
first to recognize this, `the society will follow the woman's side,
become a matriarchal society, matrilineal society.'

Also what that did
very clearly was it established the nationhood. Any child was born
was born with an identity. He had a nation. He had the clan. And
whatever his gender or her, and so we had, if it was a boy we had a
lacrosse player [chuckle] and if it was a girl we had someone who
inherited.

Bill Moyers:

The power . . .

Oren Lyons:

the power

Bill Moyers:

of choice. Who chose
you?

Oren Lyons:

Well, my Clan Mother
at that time.

Bill Moyers:

What clan?

Oren Lyons:

Turtle. I was a
Turtle, although I am a Wolf. I am a Wolf. I was borrowed into the
Turtle Clan at that time. A wonderful woman who raised many
generations of children. She carried, at some point here at Onondaga
Nation, four clanships in her hands because of the inability to find
a Clan Mother for those clans. So she carried all that extra work.
So she was about getting these things parceled out and getting them
done and she asked me whether I would consider that and I--

Bill Moyers:

consider becoming the

Oren Lyons:

becoming one of the
representatives of the Turtle Clan in Council. And I said, "Well,"
your first reaction is, you don't want to do that because the chiefs
are always busy. They're always working. They're never home. They're
always in meetings. It seemed to be quite a load.

But she said, "Well,
don't answer," she said, "Don't answer now. Think about it." And the
only words she ever said to me was, "Think of what you can do for
your people." So, finally I said, "Well, I'll try." She said,
"That's good. That's all I want to hear."

Bill Moyers:

Was it a hard choice
to bring your kids back from New York to live here?

Oren Lyons:

No. No. It was I
think, probably the best thing I could have done for them.

Bill Moyers:

Where do they belong?
Here or out in that other world?

Oren Lyons:

Everybody belongs
here. All Onondagas belong here. Whether they live there or not.
It's the same as if you had a U.S. citizenship and you were living
in Paris. You always go back to America, right?

Bill Moyers:

Right.

Oren Lyons:

It's the same. So if
you're an Onondaga and you're living in Boston, which they are, and
if you're living in New York, which they are, your home is here.

Bill Moyers:

The conflict, it
seems to me, is that you're talking -- you just outlined a wonderful
story of a consciousness from another time and another mentality.
And they're facing all the time, your children, the technology of
the modern world which seduces them away from the intuitive
thinking.

Oren Lyons:

Oh yes, no doubt.
There's an attrition. Sure. Every generation has faced an attrition.
But on the other hand there's also a distillation. A distillation of
these ideas, of these thoughts here and the society itself: the
importance of the leadership and the Chiefs and the Clan Mothers.
The message that they have is extraordinarily important in these
times. And the teachings that are there.

I mentioned the
second message, which was the Great Peace. We had a third message.
The third message came around 1799 and if you go back in history,
this was directly after the Revolutionary War. And you're looking at
the turmoil that was in Indian country, particularly Six Nation
country, during that time.

We had a third
message from Gunyundiyo, who people call Handsome Lake. Handsome
Lake was taken on a journey, shall we say, for four days. During
that time he was shown the future of what was going to happen. And
he was given instructions on how to deal with the white man.

Bill Moyers:

Instructions by?

Oren Lyons:

By the four
protectors, by the spiritual side of our life. And so they told him
what was coming. This summer, that story will be told again here in
this long house, as it's told every year in every long house across
the Six Nations.

Bill Moyers:

What did he say was
coming? What will you observe? What will you think about this?

Oren Lyons:

Well, it goes on and
on. Four days of it.

Bill Moyers:

Is there a central
message?

Oren Lyons:

Yes. The central
message is there is going to be a deterioration and a falling away
of life as we know it. There is going to be destruction. There's . .
. well, for instance, how these things were told, and I have to be
quite careful about how I do this because we're on national
television. I don't have the authority and the right to begin
discussing things at large without the consent of the Nation or the
people. I'm not free to do that.

But it's clear enough
and people have known enough. For instance, for water, [they] talked
about water, he was shown things in vignettes. And he said [that]
they would ask him, `What do you see?' He said, `I see a river.' And
they said, `Pick up the water to drink.' And he reached his hands in
and picked the water up and he said, `I can't. It's filthy.' They
said, `We think what you say is correct. At some time the water is
going to be that way.' And he talked then--

Bill Moyers:

And he was
anticipating the environmental degradation that we, it's not a
legend.

Oren Lyons:

At one time he was
shown a field of corn -- a field. It wasn't corn. It was a garden
and someone was working in the garden. And he described that. They
said, `Observe.' At one point, the man reached down and pulled up
the plant, to see what was on the roots. And there was nothing on
the root. They said, `What do you see?' He says, `He's pulled a
plant and there's nothing there.'

Bill Moyers:

What do you make of
that?

Oren Lyons:

What they were told .
. . as he was told a lot about these things that were coming [he
asked], `What is the hope?' `Well,' they said, `it's certain that
this will happen. But that's up to each generation to see that it
doesn't happen in your generation.'

Bill Moyers:

So that the lesson,
the vision he received, the chief received, was that destruction --
environmental destruction, physical destruction -- could come in
every generation. But each generation is charged not to let it
happen.

Oren Lyons:

Yes. So actually, the
hope lies in the intensity of the life of that generation. You can
only live one day at a time, regardless.

Bill Moyers:

And yet, the
publication that you produce, Daybreak, is dedicated to the
seventh generation unborn.

Oren Lyons:

Yes. Th[ose were] the
instructions that were given as a Chief. When we were given these
instructions, among many of them, one was that when you in sit in
council for the welfare of the people, you counsel for the welfare
of that seventh generation to come. They should be foremost in your
mind, not even your generation, not even yourself, but those that
are unborn. So that when their time comes here they may enjoy the
same thing that you are enjoying now.

Bill Moyers:

Is that kind of a
moral obligation?

Oren Lyons:

I believe that all of
this discussion between human beings is one of morality. I think
that everyone has to deal with the emotions that are in each
individual. And we understand that we have both good and bad in us
and that you must strike a balance at all times. This spiritual
center then, is what the Great Tree of Peace is. It's a spiritual
center. It's a spiritual law--

Bill Moyers:

The Peacemaker, when
he came, planted a Tree of Peace?

Oren Lyons:

A Tree of Peace, a
Great Peace, a great law. It's a spiritual law. He said, `When you
become afraid or when you become weak or when you become not able to
carry,' he says, `it's the spiritual law that will stiffen your
spine.' He said, `That's where your strength is. So you must make
your laws in accordance with those spiritual laws and then you will
survive.'

He called that
council the Council of the Good Minds. He said the Hoyanni -- that's
what it means, the all-good, the good, peacemakers. So that's what
he set up. And when he uprooted this great tree and he asked the
Nations to come forward and cast their weapons of war, he says, `We
now do away with the warriors and we do away with the war chiefs.
And in their place we plant the Council of the Good Minds who will
now counsel for the welfare of the people.' And he said, `I shall
not leave you defenseless.' And he gave us a spiritual strength,
Oyenkwaohweh, the Great Tobacco. He said, `This will be your medium
for communication, directly.'

Bill Moyers:

With the Great
Tobacco?

Oren Lyons:

Yes. We have sacred
tobacco. He said `This is your spiritual strength.'

Bill Moyers:

The peace pipe, then,
is a metaphor as well as a physical

Oren Lyons:

actually

Bill Moyers:

object, a material
object.

Oren Lyons:

Actually. That's why
this peace is so foremost in our minds. So he said, `Now, the three
principles will be peace, equity and justice and the power of the
Good Minds. So everyone must think that way. When your people think
that way and everyone has the same position and the same mind of
being of one mind [that] is the greatest power there is.' And so
that's what we're instructed, to have that mind.

Bill Moyers:

But the history of
your people since the Peacemaker came millennia ago has been one
like [that] of other people, of enmity and conflict and competition.
The Great Teachings were wise and wonderful philosophy breached so
often and had been breached so often in the fact, in our behavior.

Oren Lyons:

Yes. It's
visionaries, in talking or understanding Black Elk's vision, what he
said--

Bill Moyers:

North Dakota, in the
Dakotas

Oren Lyons:

in
the Dakotas, yes, the great Dakota people, Lakota. His vision was
very much along with ours.

And then when we hear
the stories of other nations, of how they came to be; when we hear
how the Hopis talk about the Spider Woman and coming from the Earth
and the Fourth World that they've experienced, the fourth failure of
man, again tried, how they come forward and try again.

We hear the walkabout
songs of the aboriginal people in Australia when they talk about
singing into existence these beings; all the entities of the world,
as far as they are concerned, ha[ve] a song.

And we say, `That's
wonderful. We agree. We say yes. Now hear our story. This is how we
came.' And they listen to us and they say, `That's wonderful. We
believe that.'

Bill Moyers:

But your story; look
what the gun, the church, the dollar and the bottle did to your
story. You got run over.

Oren Lyons:

Well, you pretty much
put them all down there. [This is] what they talked about at the
time. We did and we didn't. We're still here. We're not through. The
story's not over. You're still talking to a chief. You're still
talking and you're sitting here in that Onondaga Nation, the center
of the Hau de no sau nee. The tree is still here. The roots are
still out. And if anything I see the roots growing at this point.

Bill Moyers:

What do you mean?
What's evidence that . . .

Oren Lyons:

Well, as I watch,
especially in the eastern bloc of Europe, how these people are
clamoring for freedom and for democracy. How they're looking towards
the Americas for democracy. How the Chinese were using the symbol of
the Statue of Liberty as democracy and they were saying, `This is
great that it is coming from America.' But America got it from the
Indians. America
got the ideas of democracy and freedom and peace here.

Bill Moyers:

Do you subscribe to
the opinion that some of what we call founding fathers were affected
directly by what Indians were doing and thinking in the shaping of
government?

Oren Lyons:

Oh yes. They were
impacted very directly. When the Wampanoags met the Pilgrims, there
was a great leader by the name of Massasoit. And Massasoit saw to it
that there was peace between the two. And now, we see it as our
grandfathers talked to Benjamin Franklin and talked to those people
and explained--

Franklin was taking,
recording. He was the recording secretary at the time. He was quite
a young man, and of course they were talking to, I think it was the
Governor of Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania at the time.

Bill Moyers:

The chiefs were?

Oren Lyons:

The Six Nation chiefs
were talking and they advised them then to join in a union like the
Hau de no sau nee. Be like us they said because, `There's a great
power in being together of one mind and we have unity,' as the
Peacemaker bound those arrows.

When he [was]
illustrating to the chiefs, he took one arrow. He said, `This is a
nation.' And he snapped the arrow. Then he took the five nations and
five arrows and he bound it with the sinew of the deer. Then he
said, `You can't break this unity.' He says, `This is your symbol,
unity. You must be united. You must be of one mind.'

Bill Moyers:

Is there any
indication that Ben Franklin was influenced by what he heard and
recorded?

Oren Lyons:

I think there's a lot
of evidence. One of the things that he did -- he's the one that was
listening. The three, the three politicians, shall we say, were not
listening. But Benjamin Franklin was, I would say, the visionary. He
saw the nation. He saw a free nation. He said, "Why, if these," I
think the quote was something like, "if this group of ignorant
savages can build something that looks indissoluble," he says, "why
can we not, who have all of the same needs, do the same?" More or
less. [1]

He called a meeting
in 1754 in Albany, New York, called
the Albany Plan of Union. At that time he had asked the chiefs
of Six Nations and other Indians to come forward and talk about the
process of governance and the process of representation in
government and the process of the peaceful transference of power
from one generation to the next: two houses, a discussion, power of
people in the hands of the people.

All of this really
intrigued him. Of course, the King of England wasn't too happy with
all of this and put a stop to it rather quickly. But it was on its
way.

On the eve of the
Revolution, in 1775,
delegates from the Continental Congress met with the Six Nation
chiefs and said, at the time, that, `Your grandfathers advised
us in 1744 in Lancaster to make a union such as yours. And now we're
going to take your advice and we're going to plant a Tree of Peace
in Philadelphia that will reach to the sky and people can come under
it.'

They used our
metaphors . . . and the chiefs said, `That's wonderful, good. We
like to hear that.' And they said, `We want neutrality in the coming
war.' Then . . . the chiefs said, `It's a fight between a father and
son. We love you both and we know you both and we agree that we
should be neutral.'

So a treaty was
struck then, in 1776, in Fort Pitt and . . . delegates from the
Continental Congress came and brought a great belt, a Peace Belt
with 13 diamonds in it. And not the diamonds that you wear on your
finger, but a design of 13 diamonds representing the 13 colonies.
This belt was taken by the Six Nations and they agreed to this
peace, which is really expunged from your history.

Bill Moyers:

How does it affect
you when you go back and look at the record? Despite the sympathetic
signals that went back and forth between some of the first
Americans, your people, and some of the new Americans, the Franklins
and the Jeffersons and others; how, in time, one treaty after
another was broken, slavery was practiced by these very men who
wrote, "We, the people," your own people shunted aside to
reservations, today decimated by alcohol, despair. You yourself have
talked to colleagues of mine about the drug use among young people,
the rise of crime. I mean, what --

Well, it's
interesting because I think, in looking, stepping back from the
world and looking at it from a distance and looking at it from the
time, you would say that in North America at that time, they took an
ember, they took a light from our fire and they carried that over
and they lighted their own fire and they made their own nation. They
lighted this great fire. And that was a great light at that time of
peace. Because that's what they said they were following. And that
came about.

In 1776 there was
this great light and this Earth, if you saw the Earth from back, you
would see this brilliance. Then, as time went on, the brilliance
died down. It began to die down. And what happened?

The question that you
asked was, first of all, they refused to deal with the history of
slavery right at the time. That light started to die immediately.

They refused to use
spirituality as part of their nation. It died a little bit more. We
said, `You're going to have trouble. Our advice to you was a
spiritual center.' And you say, `You separate the church from the
state.' But you already had conflict. So they separated them. And we
said, `Problem coming.'

And so then, what was
beginning to happen, the things that were brought from across the
sea began to reassert themselves once they established their
position and became strong. And the light diminished more.

So
when you came through the 19th century, the 19th century is a
terrible page in the history of America, [of] what happened to
Indians. It's a terrible page when many, many millions of people
were killed and died. And so this process died. And suddenly, at the
end of the century, the turn of the century (the 20th century), the
word was to carry a big stick and to talk softly.

Bill Moyers:

Theodore Roosevelt.

Oren Lyons:

But what was that?
That was imperialism. Again, an expansion of power over, dominion
over. It was not agreeing with.

So
we are now facing another situation. Can we get this light, can we
get this great light to come again? And that's up to this
generation. That's up to, really, we're elders, you and I now. I
mean, we can say from our older position, "It looks like a lost
cause." But if you were to speak to the young man, the young person,
the young woman, she'd say, "No. This is my life. I shall survive.
You can't tell me that it's lost. That's my determination." She will
say, and he will say that, and they are saying it.

So we can say, "Well,
it looks bad from here." And from there they say, "Well, it's looks
tough, but it isn't lost." And that's the law that they were talking
about from Gunyundiyo, when he said, `Don't let it be your
generation.' And the law prevails, what we call
the Great
Law, the common law, the natural law.

Bill Moyers:

And the law says?

Oren Lyons:

The law says if you
poison your water, you'll die. The law says that if you poison the
air, you'll suffer. The law says if you degrade where you live,
you'll suffer. The law says all of this. If you don't learn that
then you can only suffer. There's no discussion with this law.

Bill Moyers:

There's no mercy in
nature. You can't get down on your knees and ask forgiveness, can
you? Nature takes back what you've done to it.

That's really a
spiritual law. That's a very important thing for people to
understand. When you transgress, there's a time . . . People don't
operate in the world time or say the time of the mountain. They
operate in the time of the human being. And that's probably not a
good idea. Because the time of the human being is rather short.

And yet, when you're
dealing in the time of an oak tree or a time of one of the great
Sequoias and you kill that tree [with] your technology today. You
can take a chainsaw and in 10 minutes kill a tree that's 400 years
old. There's no way that you can make that tree grow. You'll have to
wait another 400 years for it to get to that position.

So the technology has
overtaken the common sense of human beings and the understanding of
time. And just as the time of the ant is very, very short, the time
of the mountain is very long, the rivers. The time of the human
being has to be passed along. And if you don't have a reference
point, if you don't have a good understanding of what this time is,
then you can get yourself and your people and your generation into a
whole lot of trouble. I think that's where we are right now.

Bill Moyers:

What kind of trouble
do you mean? You're talking about environmental trouble.

Oren Lyons:

Yes, indeed. I'm
talking about making payment now. When, as long as I can remember
and as long as in the memory of our people, we've had celebrations
for the thundering voices, our grandfathers, the rain-makers, the
people that bring the rain and bring the fresh water. They refresh
the springs and the lakes.

Bill Moyers:

Doesn't your language
refer to the rain as "Grandfather"?

Oren Lyons:

As the grandfathers.

Bill Moyers:

--and the sun as
"Uncle"?

Oren Lyons:

Yes, they do, indeed.
But now, suddenly, the rain that we celebrate and the rain that we
pray for and the rain that we thanksgiving for begins to kill. What
is that? What happens when your grandfathers begin to turn on you
and your great brother, the Elder Brother, the Sun, when suddenly,
people begin to suffer from cancer from the sun? What are people
going to do when these life-giving forces, that you've depended on,
that you've prayed to, that you recognize, give thanksgiving to,
suddenly turn on you? What happens?

Bill Moyers:

Exactly what do
indigenous people, Indians, have to offer in this regard to the rest
of us?

Oren Lyons:

First of all we have
a long perspective. We've been in one place a long time. We've seen
the sun come up [in] the same place many, many hundreds, thousands
of years. And so we have a familiarity with the Earth itself, [with]
the elements. We know about them and we know what it is to enjoy
that.

So the ceremonies,
which are as ancient as we are, carry forward this respect. Our
people were always spiritual people, religious people. They always
had ceremonies. This was our first instruction, was the ceremony:
how to carry that on. And the ceremonies were our thanksgivings,
every one of them.

So we had these
extraordinary rounds of thanksgiving every year; all the same songs
again at certain time, all the same dances at certain time, are very
familiar. Again if you go down and watch the Pueblos as they do
their Deer Dance, as they do their Bean Dance, and watch the Hopis
as they do their Snake Dance, these are old, ancient ceremonies.
Everybody knows them and everybody participates in them. You
continue because they are what you are instructed to do which is to
give thanks.

Bill Moyers:

For what?

Oren Lyons:

For what is given to
you here. Pilgrims got a hold of it and they called it Thanksgiving.
Well that's only one, that's only the harvest part of it. They don't
go all the way around the whole clock.

Children are not sat
down and taught about what's good and what's wrong. What they see is
they see their grandfathers or they see their fathers or their
mothers, their grandmothers going to ceremonies. And they say, "So
that must be the right thing to do. The old people do it. Everybody
does it. That's good." So they do it. And so they learn, in the
process, that thanksgiving, what is it for?

Well this one is for
the maple, the Chief of the Trees. We're giving a thanksgiving for
the maple. Good. Must respect the tree. Must respect all the trees.
So respect is learned through ceremony. As a process. It's an old
one. And so thanksgiving comes as a natural way, as a being. It's
part of life. It's not something that you do occasionally. It's
something you do all the time. And that's how the process has been
passed down.

And so we have these
well-springs of knowledge about places that only aboriginal people
would know because they have lived there. They have intimate
knowledge of what's there. And when people are destroyed and
languages are destroyed, you destroy that knowledge along with it.
So what you're saying, What do they have to offer? Indigenous
people, I think, may have the long-term thinking required for proper
context.

Bill Moyers:

Context being?

Oren Lyons:

Being life as it
functions in the cycles, in the great cycles of life. As we do our
cycle of being born and going back to the Earth again. As the tree
is a sapling and grows to full being and then falls as it goes back
to the Earth again. As the spring comes and the fall and the winter.
And it comes again. It's endless this cycle, as long as you protect
the cycle. As long as you participate in the cycle. As long as you
honor it and respect it. Then it will continue. But it doesn't have
to.

Bill Moyers:

Do you think it's a
given that human beings are a permanent feature of this natural
world? I mean, does the world need us that much?

Oren Lyons:

The world doesn't
need us at all. I think it's probably better off, where the world is
concerned, what we call the wilderness, which is again an English
term. Indians didn't even have a word for "wild." They didn't know
what that meant. So out there in this pristine, shall we say, land
where everybody wants to go and see and be for a little while,
that's the beauty of a place. And sometimes there's people there who
are so unintrusive that you don't even see them. They've acclimated
to the place. They live there with it, as part of it. And that's the
people who have a knowledge.

Bill Moyers:

More and more people
are turning to natives, to Indians and saying, "Share your knowledge
with us." But don't you think -- honestly, now, practically -- it is
too late? For how many years have we had the dominant note, the
clarion trumpet of `conquer the Earth,' you have dominion over the
Earth. We're building cities to create habitats far-removed from
this. Our mentality is a part of that "civilization" now. What
you're talking about is wonderful and wise, the stories are profound
and instructive and yet, irrelevant.

Oren Lyons:

Well, maybe.

Bill Moyers:

To this modern world.

Oren Lyons:

It may be irrelevant
at the moment. We don't preach here, in this, our country. We don't
proselytize. We try to, as a matter of fact, we try to protect what
we have from intrusion.

Yet at a meeting that
was held in Hopi back in 1969, when we sat there with many Indian
leaders from around the country, spiritual leaders, and they talked
about these young people who were sitting on our doorsteps every day
when we got up and they had come from all over the country and they
were coming to be an Indian or they were coming to learn something
about us. And we said, `This is a very strange phenomenon, that our
white brother's children are now coming to our doorstep and wanting
to be part of us. What do we do with this?'

One of the Hopi
elders said, `Well we have a prophecy about that.' And he said that
there was going to come a time when they're going to come and ask
for direction. Maybe this is what's happening.

So it came under
discussion and it was agreed upon at that time that perhaps this may
be true. And if it is, then we should be more responsive then, to
the questions. And we should maybe try to help. To see what we can
do. To pass on whatever we can, however we can.

So it was agreed upon
at that time that we would work more directly, then. And we have
been much more directly since that time.

How much can be
imparted is hard to say. But the "isms" of this world -- communism,
capitalism, all of these "isms" -- are really quite, quite bereft of
[a] spiritual side to it.

And what we were told
when we made our laws, when the Great Law was put down, was to have
the spiritual center of it, the center of the law to be spiritual,
the Great
Law. So when we see people who don't deal with this entirely,
then we say, `Well, it's only going to be a matter of time when it's
going to come to a problem.'

Bill Moyers:

The reality of human
beings keeps intruding on the stories and the philosophy, the
instructions.

Oren Lyons:

Well, it's an ongoing
discussion which each generation has to learn. What Indians are
about, I think, first of all is community. They're about mutual
support. They're about sharing. They're about understanding what's
common land, common air, common water, common and for all. They're
about freedom.

Bill Moyers:

But they [are]
divided and separated on the reservations. Many of those who come
into the larger world perish psychologically, emotionally,
spiritually.

Oren Lyons:

And on the
reservations as well. But this is an intrusion again by our white
brother. He has made these reservations. He has controlled that.
We've gone from a great power to a small power. Now, Chief Seattle
said, `As the waves come, one behind the other,' he said, `so
nations come. And as the waves disappear, so nations disappear. So
perhaps,' he said, `this is what will happen to us.'

Bill Moyers:

Don't your people
call yourselves "the real people"?

Oren Lyons:

Yes, the real people.

Bill Moyers:

The real people in
the sense of, not exclusion. That's not meant, as I understand it,
in the exclusionary sense. It means, "We are here, material people."

Oren Lyons:

Yes.

Bill Moyers:

"We are part of this
physical world."

Oren Lyons:

We are now. We are
now. Now is us. We're the seventh generation. I'm sitting here as
the seventh generation because seven generations ago those people
were looking out for me. Seven generations from now someone will be
here, I know. So each generation makes sure that seven generations
is coming, all the time.

Yes we are. And they
are going to call us. They're the ones that are going to say, `Why
did you do this?' Or `Why did you not do this?'

Bill Moyers:

I wish I could
believe that about the human being. Because when I see what this
generation has been handed. Our present generation's been handed
quite a legacy of pollution, poisoned rivers, forests disappearing.
These 500 year-old trees you talk about being cut down for the
bottom-line now. I mean it's, I'm not sure that what you call the
seventh generation and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson call
posterity are getting a fair deal.

Oren Lyons:

Oh life isn't fair is
it? Life has never been fair. It's [a] hard lesson. Because when
you're young and you're brought up, you're protected and people make
sure that things are even and divided equally among the children.
And all of a sudden, when you're out and you find out, "No, it
doesn't work that way. How come I'm sick and he isn't? How come they
died or this is going to happen here?"

But that's life. And
as we say, Each person is born with a number of days in your hand.
When you come to the end of that number, then that's your time. And
some people say, "Well, they died too soon. They didn't finish." No
they finished. They finished what they were going to do. That was
it.

It's not fatalistic
as much as reality; your part and your time, the time that you're a
great tree. Remember the words of Red Jacket when he said, `I'm an
old man.' He says, `My limbs are old and there's no leaves on them
and I'm ready to fall,' he says. `But my heart fails me when I think
of the children and what faces them.' He was talking about me. Well,
I'm here. I'm here. I feel pretty good.

And the other thing,
I guess, is very important is that we shouldn't take ourselves so
seriously.

Bill Moyers:

Even a chief?

Oren Lyons:

Oh yes, especially a
chief, I guess. I think you're just a human being, really. And you
happen to take on a responsibility that anybody else could have
taken on if they wanted to do it and took the commitment to do it.
And you begin to see the serious side of things quite a bit.

But nevertheless, in
all of this there's life to be lived. I said [there was] an
instruction and the instruction was to give thanks. There was a
second instruction that I didn't mention. That was to enjoy life.

Bill Moyers:

What sustains you?

Oren Lyons:

My belief in the
people. My belief in the ceremonies. My belief in the Earth. And I'm
really optimistic, coming all down to it.

Bill Moyers:

Vaclav Havel said
recently that hope is not optimism. Hope is a state of the spirit, a
state of the soul.

Oren Lyons:

Yes. I deal in
reality. I deal very much in reality. In order for us to have
survived up to this point, we have to deal in reality.

Bill Moyers:

But you see, you have
survived because you -- well, have you survived? Indigenous people
have lived for centuries close to nature, in harmony with this
world. And yet you've been overwhelmed by the material progress of
the industrial society. Have you really survived or is it just the
stories that survive?

Oren Lyons:

No, I don't think so.
I think the spirit is quite there. Then I think the spirit is
manifested outside as we look about here. It's all here.

We are told about the
long house. As long . . . about the ceremonies, the power of the
ceremonies and the thanksgiving that we are instructed to do. They
said, "As long as there's one to sing and one to dance, one to speak
and one to listen, life will go on." So as long as the instructions
are being carried out, even if it's down to the last four, life will
go on.

Bill Moyers:

[narration] From the
Onondaga Nation in upstate New York, this has been a conversation
with Chief Oren Lyons. I'm Bill Moyers.